"WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL"

Is something people used to jokingly say in debate to make fun of high school teenagers who used Baudrillard to make their point and acted like they fully understood him. 

I definitely still don't fully understand him and I'm not sure I ever will. 

Nevertheless the two parts of Baudrillard that interested me the most were first, his discussion of Disneyland as an artificial and infantile world that is set up in such a way that makes us think the “adult” world is non-infantile and non-simulated and second, his idea that media tries to make itself seem real and creates a replication for which there is no original.

And I guess it interested me most because I feel at least partially guilty of participating in that kind of simulation as someone who works in a virtual reality lab on campus. At work, we’re always talking about the difference between VR and the real world or how to make VR more like the real world or how we purposefully want to leave some differences intact to experiment with how some things can be left as noticeably unreal but still feel immersive and real based on the immersive quality of other aspects of the VR world.

And the other thing we do that Baudrillard would probably hate is we have based our entire VR world on a young adult novel that imagines an alternate WWI history that’s more biomech/steampunk, but that also has totally different politics. Which, to some, would probably incidentally reaffirm our current historical idea of WWI as real, rather than the projection of historians working with limited information.

To be honest, though, while I feel guilty of doing what Baudrillard talks about, I don’t feel guilty as if it is some horrible thing. I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think the existence of all of these modern simulacra can actually force us to question the “realness” of reality, rather than treat it as artificially realer than our imagined worlds. I mean, I think the fact that their existence has given rise to a writer like Baudrillard is interesting. We’re forced to question the realness of reality MORE in my opinion simply because there are all these simulations swimming about. And it’s not as if the nonreality of reality is the new part. It’s always been around with misinformation, propaganda, artificial images of royalty/celebrity, etc. So, I guess speaking personally, the only area where Baudrillard’s concerns really concern me is war. But that’s a separate issue and wasn’t really addressed in this excerpt. But yeah, drones and the virtualizing of war is really scary.

By Jack